A business process is an ordered series of business events, which manage exchange of information from one or more sources to one or more destinations under control of structured business rules that govern the purpose of the business process. Such sources and destinations may be internal, customer, or partner applications, applied to control how the change and exchange of information is accomplished. Likewise, the business process will have various sub-processes representing unit business services that may or may not be reusable across various business processes. These business processes, together with the sub-processes, make the business system highly robust and complicated.
In a typical business system having multiple business processes across various geographical locations, integration of these business processes becomes essential to the business automation efficiency and productivity. Conventionally, business processes across various business systems have been standardized to facilitate the integration. However, there are problems related to this sort of standardization.
First, the standardization strategies are not aligned to the business goals and objectives and information technology strategies, thereby creating a gap in the delivered business benefit. Second, non-aligned business processes may create potential points of failure in the information technology architecture leading to frequent non-availability of applications and loss of functioning of one or more business processes. Third, the conventional methods of integration are highly complex and expensive, especially when integrating more than one business system component. Fourthly, the conventional methods of integration are not dynamic and are not adapted for any modification during any change of business processes, resulting in impact on time-to-market performance of the business process change.
Accordingly, there is a need for techniques of integrating various business processes in a business system through a common set of well-defined technologies, methodologies, and frameworks.